Archive for the ‘APIs’ Category

File Under: APIs, HTML5, Web Standards
Feb
14
2013

Improve Your Website’s Accessibility With the W3C’s ‘Guide to Using ARIA’

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WAI-ARIA, the W3C’s specification for Accessible Rich Internet Applications, provides web developers with a means of annotating page elements with the roles, properties, and states that define exactly what those elements do. The added definitions help screen readers and other assistive devices navigate through your website.

We’ve looked at how you can use ARIA roles to not just improve your site’s accessibility, but style elements as well, but now you can get the official word from the W3C. The W3C has published the First Public Working Draft of Using WAI-ARIA in HTML.

The W3C’s guide goes beyond the ARIA Landmark Roles that we’ve covered in the past, offering suggestions on how ARIA can help with HTML5 apps that load dynamic content or build entire interfaces with JavaScript. In fact, this is where the true power of ARIA comes into play since there is often no other way for assistive devices to get at your application’s data.

Unfortunately not everything in the ARIA spec works in every screen reader. Support for the landmark roles is pretty solid, but much of the rest remains a work in progress. As always there’s no substitute for real world testing.

File Under: APIs, Multimedia
Feb
5
2013

Google, Mozilla Team Up for Skype-Killing Video Call Demo

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Modified WebRTC logo by Tsahi Levent-Levi/Flickr.

Google and Mozilla, erstwhile rivals in the web browser world, have teamed up to show off the power of WebRTC by creating a web-based video chat app — think Skype without Skype.

The demo bypasses a centralized server and instead makes a direct peer-to-peer connection between browsers. The key component of the demo is a set of work-in-progress standards known as WebRTC.

WebRTC is a proposed standard — currently being refined by the W3C — with the goal of providing a web-based set of tools that any device can use to share audio, video and data in real time. It’s still in the early stages, but WebRTC has the potential to supplant Skype, Flash and many device-native apps with web-based alternatives that work on any device.

The app that the Chrome and Firefox teams developed is available on Google Code and there’s a demo app available on Google app engine if you’d like to try it out for yourself. To make it work you’ll need to use either Firefox Nightly or Chrome 25 (currently in the beta channel). In Firefox, you’ll need to go to about:config and set media.peerconnection.enabled to “true.”

Mozilla has previously showed off a demo of WebRTC with it Social API and Chrome has previously used parts of WebRTC for an interactive sand sketching experiment. This latest demo relies on a new WebRTC trick known as RTCPeerConnection, which should arrive in final form in Chrome next month and Firefox around the end of May. The RTCPeerConnection support in both browsers means there’s no need for plugins and developers can rest assured their apps will “just work” across browsers. Together Chrome and Firefox account for just under 60 percent of browsers on the web.

There is of course one other major browser that’s not yet coming to the WebRTC party.

Indeed Microsoft has proposed a WebRTC competitor to the W3C, though thus far little has happened beyond the initial proposal. As it stands now neither WebRTC nor Microsoft’s competing CU-RTC-Web proposal are actual W3C standards, but work is progressing on WebRTC and, with browsers already implementing it in the wild, it stands a much better chance of becoming a standard one day.

It’s still a little early to throw out Skype. For now you’ll have to content yourself with a very cool demo and the tantalizing possibility to one day soon you might not need Skype, Facebook or any other third-party server to chat with friends around the web.

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File Under: APIs, Multimedia
Jan
29
2013

Amazon Tackles Web Video With New Conversion Service

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Amazon is getting into the web video game with a new video transcoding service aimed at making it easy to build the next YouTube.

Transcoding video is the process of taking a user uploaded video and converting it to a video format that works on the web, typically MP4 and WebM. Consumer video services like YouTube and Vimeo handle this for you behind the scenes. But if you want to actually build the next Vimeo or YouTube you’re going to have transcode video.

Open source tools like ffmpeg simplify the video transcoding process, but require considerable server power to operate at scale. And server power is something Amazon has in spades.

Amazon’s foray into video is hardly the first cloud-powered video transcoding service — Zencoder is another popular service (and runs on Amazon servers) — but Amazon’s offering is marginally cheaper and well-integrated with the company’s other services.

The Amazon Elastic Transcoder works in conjunction with the company’s other cloud offerings like S3 file storage. You send a video from one S3 “bucket” to Transcoder, which then converts it to the formats you need and writes the resulting files to another S3 bucket.

For now the Elastic Transcoder will only output MP4 video containers with Apple-friendly H.264 video and AAC audio. The new Transcoder options in the Amazon Web Services control panel allow you to create various quality presets if, for example, you’re delivering video to both mobile and desktop clients.

As with all Amazon Web Services the new Transcoder has a pay-as-you-go pricing model with rates starting at $0.015 per minute for standard definition video (less than 720p) and $0.030 per minute for HD video. That means transcoding a 10 minute video (the max on YouTube) would cost you $.15 for SD output and $.30 for HD, which sounds cheap until you start looking at transcoding several hundred 10-minute videos a day (200 a day would set you back $60 a day for HD). Amazon’s free usage tier will get you 20 minutes of SD video or 10 minutes of HD video encoded for free each month.

Amazon’s rates are marginally cheaper than Zencoder, which charges $0.020/minute for SD and double that for HD. Zencoder does have a considerable edge when it comes to output format though, offering pretty much anything you’d need for the web, including live streaming, while, at least for now, Amazon’s offering is limited to MP4.

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File Under: APIs, Web Services
Jan
23
2013

Google’s Cloud Platform Floats Over to GitHub

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Google’s Cloud Platform tools are now available on GitHub. The move to GitHub will make it easier for developers already using GitHub to get started with Google’s various Cloud Platform offerings.

Thus far most of the repositories in Google’s GitHub account consist of code samples and projects related to offerings like App Engine, BigQuery, Compute Engine, Cloud SQL, and Cloud Storage.

The Google Open Source Blog says that most of Google Cloud Platform’s existing open source tools will be migrated to the new GitHub organization “over time.”

For now though you can get started building apps on Google Cloud Platform just by forking one of the demo repositories and tweaking the code to fit your project. Sample apps like the guestbook demos for Python and Java, along with the OAuth 2 helper apps, make a good place to start if you’ve never built anything on Google’s cloud platform before.

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File Under: APIs, CSS, HTML, JavaScript
Dec
4
2012

‘Tis the Season … To Write Better Code

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The holidays are here and for web nerds that means only one thing — another wave of advent tutorials is hitting the web.

It doesn’t feel much like winter right now at the Webmonkey lair, but that’s okay because we mark the start of the holiday season by the launch of 24Ways, the grand poobah of advent calendars for web nerds. 24Ways has been an annual tradition since 2005, offering 24 articles packed with new tips and tricks showcasing some of the year’s best new ideas in web development.

This year’s 24Ways kicked off with a tutorial on HTML5 Video “Bumpers” by 24Ways founder Drew McLellan. Other articles thus far include how to start a project on the right foot, how to contribute code to the community and Geri Coady’s excellent article on Color Accessibility.

While 24Ways may be the biggest name in advent tutorials, it’s not lacking for competition these days. We also recommend the Performance Calendar, which tackles the often confusing world of website optimization. There’s also Digitpaint’s advent calendar which we enjoyed last year and has already published some nice articles this year, including this look at CSS filters.

If you’re missing another favorite, the PHP Advent Calendar, fear not, it has returned, but with a new name and domain: PHP Advent is now Web Advent. The name may have changed, but Web Advent offers similarly great content, like this article on Sharing What You Know by Heather Payne, the founder of Ladies Learning Code.

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